Shlomo paused and then saw my misunderstanding. No, not that, not a difficult person. No, she means, for the boys, it was not easy to get her.
I said, Oh I see—although I wondered, in that case, just what picaflor had referred to. Trying to hold that story together, I prodded a little. But she liked the boys? I said.
A moment in Polish, then: Yes, she liked the boys, the boys liked her, but it was not easy to get her.
I felt relieved. I said, Tell her if she had to compare Lorka with Frydka, what was the difference in their personalities?
They spoke in Polish, then Shlomo said, She didn’t know Lorka so well, but people used to say that Lorka was, you know, she was easier than Frydka.
Easier than Frydka? I remembered how adamant Anna had been about Lorka’s fidelity to her one boyfriend, Halpern—although, then again, the fact that Anna thought Lorka’s sole boyfriend had been this Halpern fellow, whereas Meg had told me that there was no question that it had been Yulek Zimmerman, should itself have suggested how fragile these perceptions, these stories could be.
She was easier than Frydka. I said, You mean with boys?
With boys, yes. She says before the war she and her friends of her age were too young to start flirting with boys. But they would look up to Lorka and take her example.
Ah, I said, I see; although of course I didn’t. I said to him, Tell her that Anna Heller said Frydka was like a butterfly with the boys…
They talked and Shlomo said, Because she was so beautiful, so it was not a problem for her to flirt with each of the boys. She says that with respect to boys, she was selfish, Frydka. She wanted them only for her!
She was selfish with the boys, she wanted them all to herself, but she wasn’t “easy.” Six thousand miles from Dyzia Lew’s hospital bed I sighed and thought, Well, why not? I had known girls like that in high school, girls who toyed with boys until one day they fell hard for one specific boy, and that was that. I thought, Nothing will ever be known about the relationship between Frydka and Ciszko: what had brought them together, what its substance and character was, what they had done together and talked about: Nothing. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to surmise, at least, that for him, it was serious enough to risk his life for, and that for her—possibly—it was serious enough for her to have given herself to him, to have become pregnant with his child. Hearing Shlomo report Dyzia’s impressions to me, she wasn’t easy, she wanted them all for herself, I realized that these two apparently contradictory details were, in fact, the bare bones of a certain story: a story of a willful and beautiful teenager, rather tall and perhaps a little bit spoiled, a girl whose flighty and egotistical personality, subjected to the tremendous and crushing pressures of war, to the unimaginable forces of hardship and suffering and grief under the Occupation, had metamorphosed into something heroic and brilliant, the way that a lump of ordinary carbon can, under the right pressure, be transformed into a diamond. But of course, we will never know.
I said: I just now want to talk more about the war time. What does she remember specifically about Frydka during the war? How and when did she see her? When was the last time that she remembers seeing her?
They talked for a while and Shlomo said, OK, this was the last time—when Frydka came to her at lunchtime when she was the Arbeitsamt. That was the last time she saw Frydka.
I asked her again what year that was. She don’t remember, she thinks it was ’forty-two. She thinks it was before the second Aktion. Frydka was free at lunchtime so she came to see her, and this Altmann.
I remembered Anna Heller Stern’s story of how she and some friends had gone once to see some young man who’d taken a room in Bolechow, and when they got to his place, Frydka answered the door. I smiled to myself and said, She came with this Altmann?
No, Shlomo said, she came to see this Altmann.
I smiled again and said, finally, Now ask her if she knows anything about Ciszko Szymanski and Frydka.
They talked for some little while in Polish.
She said that Frydka told her then about Ciszko Szymanski, and she knew that Ciszko Szymanski was in love with Frydka. She said that she knows from rumors that people said that when she was taken, he was taken, too.
It wasn’t until that moment that the fact that everything we thought we knew about the love affair between Frydka and Ciszko was based on hearsay, on rumors and stories and conversations that had taken place after the war was over, really came home to me. Now, on November 9, 2003, this short sentence, she said that Frydka told her then about Ciszko Szymanski, became for me like one of those “wormholes” which, we are told by scientists, penetrate the fabric of the universe, allowing sudden and miraculous jumps in space and time. Frydka told her then about Ciszko gave me the same feeling that Mr. Grossbard’s He never got over the Dreyfus affair! had given me eight months earlier, in Sydney: a sense that a single human memory can catapult you to a specific and now irretrievable point in space and time, and that once that single human being, that memory, disappears, the point to which it was able to hurl you also disappears, in a way. Of course Frydka must have confided to her friends about the affair at the time it was happening; but now here was the friend, and here, sixty years later, was the confidence that had been made, retrieved from the past and casually held out for my contemplation, the thing itself, not some thirdhand piece of gossip eroded and misshapen by years of handling. At that moment I imagined Frydka whispering excitedly to Dyzia, perhaps on the day Frydka had come to the Arbeitsamt—although of course it needn’t have been that day, it needn’t have been excited, it could have been dreamy, it could have been anything, since Dyzia didn’t remember what the exact words had been.
She said that she knows from rumors that people said that when she was taken, he was taken, too. I thought of what Anna Heller Stern had remembered: If you kill her, then kill me, too.
What does she remember about Ciszko Szymanski? I asked.
She remembers a little bit. He was middle height. He liked to drink, he liked to play around! Shlomo laughed, and in my mind I drew a picture of a bruiser with a solid build, a prankster, the kind of solid blond teenager I myself would have avoided in high school, never guessing how softhearted, how sentimental he could get about a certain girl, how unimaginably heroic he would turn out to be, in the end, long after I’d dismissed him as a cretin.
From Shlomo’s phone there suddenly came the noise of a small commotion: people entering the room, talking back and forth. Shlomo said, And I think we will have to make it short now, because they come to change the beds and everything, and we must move. Do you have a quick question?
A quick question? Christ, I thought. I said, Well, Shlomo, you know because you were there when we heard, that someone said Frydka was pregnant by Szymanski…
Shlomo knew where I was going with this.
Wait, wait a second, he said, I’ll ask her.
They talked for a moment, and then he said, She was pregnant, she said.
I felt a little surge—not quite satisfaction, but an obscure pleasure in the fact that this particular story seemed to be true after all. Some of the pleasure stemmed from what Mrs. Begley would call my sentimental imagination; some, on the other hand, came from the realization that this confirmation of the rumor about Frydka’s pregnancy was bound to discomfit Meg Grossbard, who in Sydney had said to me, imperiously, I know nussink!
I was thinking this when Shlomo added the following:
She says, She was pregnant, but not from Ciszko Szymanski.
AFTER A MOMENT I blinked and said, What?
Shlomo made a noise not unlike a chuckle. People talk about this, he explained, but she don’t know from whom she heard it. But she’s not sure if this is true. She thinks that they changed it, that they changed it from the name of Pepci Diamant—you know she was my cousin—and maybe they talked about Pepci Diamant and they made a mixture after so many years, and you don’t know the truth, who was who. You understand?
No, I didn’t un
derstand; in fact, I had no idea what he was talking about. It wasn’t until four weeks later, when we were sitting once again in Anna Heller Stern’s darkened apartment in Kfar Saba, that he told me the whole story: that Pepci Diamant, who was a cousin of his, had been raped, he thought, by a member of the Ukrainian police, and that, while visibly pregnant, she was killed during the same “small” Aktion in 1943 in which his sister, Miriam, had been killed—the Aktion at the Bolechow Jewish cemetery that Olga and Pyotr had witnessed, the one in which the few remaining Jews of the town had been marched along the Schustergasse and while they did so had called out to their onetime neighbors, Farewell, we won’t be seeing you again. It was at the end of this later telling of the Pepci Diamant story that Shlomo had added, It was maybe the one who raped her—the policeman who shot her there that day.
Now, as Shlomo talked to me hurriedly that morning of November 9, I was able, more or less, to piece together what he was talking about: that only Pepci Diamant had been pregnant, and that somehow, over time, the detail of the pregnancy had found its way into the story of another Jewish girl, the story of Frydka Jäger. What was clear, at the time I talked to Shlomo and Dyzia Lew—what both he and Dyzia were obviously anxious to make clear, in that conversation—was how easy it was for such things to get garbled in transmission.
You know, Shlomo said, in a small city…somebody was pregnant. The question was who. Was it Frydka or was it Pepci Diamant? You know, it was smoke, but who? Where? There was smoke, maybe there was a fire, but nobody knows.
I understood the English expression he was groping for: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But I wanted to know where the fire was, and who had set it; and all I was getting was smoke.
A few minutes later, we said our good-byes. Shlomo pointedly asked me if I wanted him to take a picture of Dyzia right there in the hospital. What he meant was, there might not be a picture to take by the time Matt and I arrived in Israel. I said yes. But this sotto voce transaction had made me feel guilty. So just before I got off the phone, I said, emphatically, Tell her I’ll see her next month, and we’ll get to talk more.
We flew to Israel exactly a month later, on the ninth of December. When we arrived on the morning of the tenth, Dyzia wasn’t there.
BUT THAT CAME later. First we went to Stockholm where, because it was winter, the light was scarce and the days were eerily short, as if time itself were being squeezed out of shape.
We arrived in Sweden at nearly one in the morning on a night whose absolute, literally crystalline purity—the air was so cold we could feel the tiny needles of frozen condensation on our cheeks—was all the more dazzling since we’d left New York during the worst blizzard to hit the city in a decade: a furious snowstorm that caused us to sit for nine hours on the runway at JFK, looking on with no little anxiety as the deicers sprayed the wings of our plane, anxiety that didn’t decrease even after we took off for Heathrow, since by that time we knew that we’d missed our connecting flight to Stockholm and were beginning to wonder whether there’d be any connections at all by the time we arrived. Through all this I found myself preoccupied with Matt, who I knew was a nervous flyer, and who thought I wasn’t looking when, at the moment of our unpleasantly bumpy takeoff, he took from his pocket a photograph, one of his own, of his six-month-old daughter and furtively kissed it, as if it were an icon. The furtiveness affected me as much as his worshipful treatment of the little icon had: the worship, because it was such a pure expression of paternal love, an emotion I’d been thinking about a great deal since my trip to Israel, and the furtiveness, because it reminded me that our improbable partnership in the search for Uncle Shmiel was still only beginning to erode the years of estrangement between me and Matt, the years of not much to say and no easy way to say it. There are many ways to lose your relatives, I thought; war is only one of them. In the photograph that Matt kissed when he thought I wasn’t looking (and would kiss again, during other takeoffs), his daughter, my niece, is dressed for a Halloween party in a green felt costume designed to make her look like a pea in a pod.
So we arrived very late at the first stop of our autumn trip, exhausted, cold, sodden, and vaguely depressed. The day that we’d entirely missed because we arrived sixteen hours late—Friday the fifth of December—was, luckily, the day we had planned to spend walking around the city and seeing the sights; our first interview with Klara was scheduled for Saturday. It is because we missed Friday that, for the most part, we missed seeing the city’s sights, and that what we know of the city remains limited to what we saw out of the windows of our taxi as we sped to meet Klara Freilich on Saturday, and what we encountered when, on Sunday and again on Monday, we met with her again. Blue and gray and white, with accents of red brick; turrets and spires and solid apartment blocks; water everywhere. We glanced at all this and chatted with the Polish-English interpreter whom I’d engaged in advance through the hotel concierge: a Polish-born woman in, I thought, her late forties, who’d lived in Stockholm now for many years. Ewa was handsome-looking, with a strong, intelligent profile and very short, very dark hair, the kind of head you associate with Roman coinage. As the taxi drove further into the suburbs of Stockholm on that overcast Saturday morning, we explained to Ewa what our project was, who Klara was, and what we were hoping to learn.
The bell of a streetcar clanged somewhere, made louder, it seemed, by the coldness of the air. Ewa looked at us and smiled. This was a very interesting project for her, she said, since she herself was Jewish. A nice coincidence! we said, although by that point I was no longer as surprised by coincidences as I might once have been. Ewa told us a little about herself. She said that it wasn’t until she’d left Poland and married the son of an Orthodox rabbi that she knew anything much about being Jewish.
My father was a Communist and my mother was not, she explained. So I didn’t know a thing about religion or Jewishness before we went to Israel. I was in a synagogue for the first time when I was married in Göteborg, in Sweden.
The driver checked the piece of paper on which we’d written the address that Meg had given us. Bandhagen seemed to consist of huge blocks of inoffensive modernistic apartment buildings; unless you lived there, I thought, it would be impossible to find your own place. As the taxi crept around the streets, Matt and I smiled and said, almost simultaneously, that we knew how Ewa felt: that we hadn’t thought much about Jewishness, either, until we’d started this project.
The car stopped. We were there.
Klara Freilich was waiting for us in the small entrance hall of her apartment, which was, Matt and I immediately noticed, filled with shoes carefully lined up against one wall. The Bolechow shoe thing! he said to me with his sudden, wide, dimpled grin. I looked at Klara, who extended her hand toward me. She was dressed with the care and slightly exaggerated stylishness that you often find in old women who have been very pretty in their youth. Although it was lunchtime, she looked like she was going out to dinner: an elegant black wool pantsuit, a double string of pearls. Her hair was jet black, and her lipstick an electric red. She was rather petite. As she looked cautiously from me to Matt, her eyes glistened behind huge, gold-plated glasses, the lenses of which, I couldn’t help noticing, were tinted a pale rose. Her face was round, its appeal enhanced rather than diminished by a witty, slightly squashed nose. Her son Marek, a big man with a solid handshake and a wide, Slavic face, stepped forward to make the introductions in English, and we all shook hands and nodded and smiled in the slightly exaggerated way you resort to when language fails. Klara said something to Marek and with a semi-apologetic laugh he asked us if we minded taking off our shoes. All the snow and slush! he said, by way of explanation. Matt and I grinned to each other and Matt said, No problem! Our mother makes us do the same thing! Marek laughed and said he was very interested to hear what his mother would say, since she and her late husband had rarely talked about their prewar lives to him or his siblings. He said he’d tried to get his teenaged children to come today, because he thought it was so
important that they learn about their heritage. But they hadn’t.
We went through a curtained passageway into a living room–dining room area. Against one wall, a glass-fronted credenza with three shelves was neatly filled with bric-a-brac that reinforced the sense I’d begun to get that Klara was someone who liked fine and pretty things. On the top shelf, a crowd of glass and porcelain figurines glittered: apart from one tall cupid, nearly all of these were tiny statues of ballerinas, pirouetting, tracing arabesques, arms extended, legs extended, leaning forward, standing upright in attitudes of charm and ease. On the second shelf there was a good deal of silver: a squat pitcher, a tall ewer, some champagne coupes. On the bottom shelf I glimpsed a group of rather dainty porcelain figurines: a flirtatious eighteenth-century couple in elegant clothing, forever leaning toward each other over a porcelain card table; a seated milkmaid: figurines not unlike those that had once graced the credenzas and tabletops of my own grandmothers’ apartments, which as often as not were likely to feature reproductions of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy as part of the decor, figurines whose appeal to these aging middle-class New York Jewish ladies, I have to surmise, lay in the fantasy of leisured gentility that they projected, which was the antithesis of the lives these ladies themselves had led. In Klara’s apartment, a few framed prints hung above a sofa, and a low table nearby supported a thriving plant and a silver candelabrum that held five red candles. At the far end of the room there was a small dining area featuring a table and a number of chairs, and it was there that Klara motioned for us to sit and eat and talk.
It was clear from the start that she was nervous. To put her at her ease, I said I wanted to start with some basics: for instance, what year she was born. Nineteen twenty-three, she answered, and then she asked, Why did I want to know? As we talked, I noticed that she twisted the rings on her fingers, and looked often from me and Matt to Ewa.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 45